TensaLeggy Crywank (Tensa)
American Tune's supposed to be ironic and true you mad fucks. He IS white/straight, and white people DO get advantages in this society, same with straight males.! Coming from a white person, every damn thing he said in that song is true. I think it's disgusting as well, how race/gender preference really does impact our ways of living as they do.

deathtokoalas
it's statistically false. the most privileged group in north america is east asians, followed by south asians. northern european whites are in the middle, with blacks and latinos and native americans on the bottom.

the model was developed by black academics in the southeastern us to try and understand the consequences of american apartheid. it works well enough in that limited context. you could also apply it reasonably well to, say, south africa, which has a similar history.

the problem is when you take something with an extremely limited intended application and try to blow it up to a general, universal rule. it happens all the time. and you can't blame the authors.

there's just a lot of morons out there.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas One question: which group in North America has the most money, most members in congress and the most influence?

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 these people are slaves to the investor class. bankers. pointing to the composition of congress as "privilege" is like arguing that workers must run society because they do all the work.

the investor class is mostly inherited wealth, and is a lot more diverse than you may realize.

to put it differently, the investor class will run the candidate it believes has the highest chance of winning. if the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense. it merely suggests that they are a plurality in most places, and running white people is the best way for the investor class to get votes. the investor class will readily invert this logic by running candidates of any colour and gender combination, when it is likely to maximize votes.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas"If the majority of politicians are white, it does not suggest that white people have more power in any real sense"... no? I guess there is a way to spin anything haha. You don't have to go back too far in American history when people of color had NO rights. There are many who would love to go back.

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 i want to be clear that i'm not rejecting the model outright, i'm just pointing out that it's a specific model and not a universal one. and, the people that built the model would acknowledge that. it's specifically meant to deal with the consequences of slavery, as they applied to the southeastern united states. they simply weren't interested in trying to describe a universal social phenomenon.

so, if you want to talk about white privilege in atlanta or dallas or st. louis? yeah, that's a real thing. it's a consequence of the legacy of slavery. but, if you start crunching data in chicago or detroit (even with the recent mess) or new york or toronto or seattle, you're going to see a different picture emerge. and, this is where people start pushing back.

the exact error here is called "universalizing the specific". it's a first year logic error. but you see it quite commonly in academia, especially in the social sciences, where academics want to take these ideas and paint them over these large academic or geographic areas, often with poor results.

trying to apply it to canada yields particularly bad results. i know it's called "american song", but you hear the same ideas coming from activists here. the reality? there are so few blacks in canada, that there hasn't even been a real opportunity to systemically discriminate against them. number of blacks descended from slaves in canada? statistically insignificant. blacks make up a few percentage points of the overall population, but almost all of them are highly educated recent immigrants directly from africa or the caribbean. statistically, they're actually slightly privileged due to the immigration rules requiring high levels of education for entry. so, you just can't apply a model meant to explain the legacy of slavery to a country with no serious legacy of slavery. but, people do it anyways because they want to universalize this specific idea.

(to be clear: yes, there was slavery in canada. but it was short lived, and it left almost no descendants. certainly, it didn't leave large swaths of areas of freed slaves.)

that's not to say we don't have structural racism here, but it's historically applied mostly to native americans overall - and to french canadians and east asians in specific geographic regions.

the take-away is just that critical theories are specific things, and you need to be very careful in applying them in ways that are not catered directly to the issue being analyzed.

i mean, check this out:
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/immigrants-who-outperform-mainstream-populations-us-canada-and-australia

the reason this gets scary to me is that it constructs a social hierarchy that really doesn't otherwise exist. but, if it exists in our mind, we will create it in front of us. i don't think that was the intent. but it scares me that it's often the result. worse, the type of argumentation attached to proponents of these ideas (as universals) tend to reject data and logic in favour of subjective experience. as a whole, this comes off quite orwellian.

bakerbrown6
+deathtokoalas Just curious what you might have to say about blacks in all of the jails and mostly for drugs (even though whites do more drugs)....

deathtokoalas
+bakerbrown6 yeah, that's a good example of the systemic racism that exists primarily in the american south (although the profiling exists throughout the country in different degrees). i mean, it's a backdoor to slavery. meant to replace the collapse of jim crow. the root of the problem here is in the continuation of prison labour. did you know that the prison system has a monopoly on paint in the united states? if you look at prison labourers at "workers", the united states prison system is one of the largest employers in the country. so, you get the whole school-to-prison pipeline issue.

it's just important to recognize it's a largely regional issue. we don't have any prison labour at all up here, so trying to pull that out doesn't make any sense.

i'm only going to do this once, this election cycle...

trudeau and mulcair are both horrible candidates, for their respective bases. i'd expect harper to effectively split the vote. the only really serious possibility of a change of government in the upcoming election is going to be in a highly tenuous minority situation.

let's ignore the conservative propaganda. it's useful in appealing to the base, but it has nothing to do with reality in any way.

the reality is that trudeau seems to primarily be concerned about appealing to the right, and so long as he does that he's going to bleed votes to the ndp. the liberals have not learned anything. they seem to be convinced their failures have to do with their front person, not their policies. in the end, if trudeau continues this "appeal to the right" strategy, i wouldn't expect him to perform much better than his immediate predecessors. i can only hope that they clue in to this soon...

so, as a left-leaning voter, trudeau's policies are too right-wing for me. default to mulcair, then? not so quick - he's no less of a center-right liberal. if you listen to him talk about economics, you immediately wonder why he's in the ndp. then the answer becomes clear - opportunism. and you realize you don't want to vote for this guy.

reality: all three major candidates are right-wing liberals. it's really about identity politics. and, that gives harper a major advantage.

i don't want the liberals and ndp to merge. i want one of them to re-establish the spectrum, by swinging out to the left. and, until that happens, i probably won't vote very often at all.

but, for 2015? nothing has changed. harper wins by splitting the left. again.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tom-mulcair-s-ndp-may-be-turning-a-corner-polls-suggest-1.3016628

Apollo23
The Libs have always governed from the Right--and well in opposition they criticized from the Left..

deathtokoalas
that's an over-simplification, but the rhetoric from the younger trudeau is really dramatically different. he sounds more like a democrat, most of the time.

casino logic
fair analysis of sorts. But opting out of voting is the ultimate cop out. Apathy is contagious. I dare say that all parties count strategically on a certain level of voter apathy.

BigRocks
The only focus for voters this fall is to vote for the candidate in your riding most likely to beat the conservatives. Do some research, organize, become informed and effective voters. harper is strategizing to split the vote. We can't let this happen again. 

Organize the left vote. Vote for the your local riding candidate most likely to beat the cons.

deathtokoalas
@casino logic i think that the policies i'm seeing from the liberals & ndp present apathy as the best option. the better option at this point is to let them both crash and burn and focus on a protest party to re-establish some left-wing ideas. given that there's not going to be any difference between harper & trudeau & mulcair, anyways, there's no threat in letting harper retire...

i'm not well-positioned to actually do this. i'm an introverted artist. but, tactically, these parties ought to both be abandoned at this point. there's no future with either of them.

the greens look like the easy answer, but it's also a right-wing party, so you're looking at years of power struggles. better to start clean...

deathtokoalas
@BigRocks since 2006, the parties have positioned themselves too far to the right for it to matter. even reduction to minority isn't going to matter, because you have to expect the liberals to support them on virtual everything that makes any difference. so, please don't waste your time with this. please stop pretending that there's a future in the establishment left and support a new party, instead.

Maurice
Sounds neocon to me.LPC???

Green-PAC??? Isnt that neocon???

deathtokoalas
what i'm pointing out is that the liberal party has moved dramatically to the right over the last several decades. they were previously a social democratic party that advocated for a mixed economy, which was definitely not "neo-con". today, i think neo-con is a slight exaggeration, although they're not far from it.

the green party in canada is roughly classical liberal (it's right-libertarian in origin), and should not be confused with the more left-wing green parties in the united states and europe. neo-con, or neo-liberal as we tend to say in canada and europe, would not be a very good description.

mid 30s and virtually everybody assumes i'm not legal. i was hit on by obvious high school students well into my late 20s; i'm glad that seems to have stopped, at least.

it helps to be clever rather than blunt. but, really: just ask....

i've spent a lot of time in activist groups - on the ground, interacting and protesting, as well as debating online - and i've only met around three (don't hold me to that exact number) feminists that are as "radical" as you're suggesting, and one of them was a cis male. the literature is vast and largely troubling, but it's not taken particularly seriously by most people once they get out of the classroom. most self-identified feminists have the intelligence and critical thinking skills to deconstruct this the way you have.

in a sentence, you're stating that the biggest victim of patriarchy is men. you've just hit the tip of it. i've heard dozens of women state that at meetings, conferences, book clubs and other activist get togethers. it's directly in the mainstream of feminist thinking.

it's just a shame that the loudest voices are often the ones most listened to, considering that they're quite often completely fringe.

what people want is equality. that's intuitive. and we can see that it's possible - we've all interacted in specific settings where it exists.

there's really no reason to let this stack of logically dubious, and mostly empirically debunked, "theories" erase what you're able to construct with your own experiences. it will all end up in the trash heap, eventually...